The Seattle Seahawks will face the New York Jets in Week 13. Here’s fantasy football start-sit advice for every Seahawks skill player who has the potential to make a fantasy impact during the game.
Looking for more lineup advice? Head over to our Week 13 Fantasy Start-Sit Cheat Sheet, where we cover every fantasy-relevant player in every game.
Geno Smith, QB
Geno Smith has one passing touchdown over his past two games (63 attempts) and has only two multi-pass TD efforts this season. He’s been sacked 16 times in his past three games, and we’ve seen what pressure can do to his decision-making (end-zone interception last week being the latest example).
New York opponents average the seventh-fewest drives per game, and this defense owns an above-average success rate. In my eyes, Smith is a “play in the perfect spot” fantasy quarterback, but I simply don’t view this as that.
Kenneth Walker III, RB
Kenneth Walker III has multiple catches in every one of his games this season and has earned 5+ targets in five games this season. If you gave me that sentence in August without any other context, I would have told you that he had a shot at being the top-scoring running back in our game.
That, of course, hasn’t been the case. We haven’t seen the explosive plays that we penciled in as part of Walker’s profile. Heck, we haven’t seen even league-average production over the past month.
Walker doesn’t have a 30-yard run this season and has averaged under 4.0 yards per carry in back-to-back-to-back-to-back games. He has a stranglehold on the lead role in Seattle, and that role slots him into my top 20 without much thought.
Maybe we can get a spike performance against an underachieving Jets run defense that ranks 20th in terms of EPA. I’m hopeful, but at the very least, you can lock in 14-16 carries and 3-5 targets in an above-average offense.
Zach Charbonnet, RB
Zach Charbonnet’s playing time has increased in consecutive weeks with Kenneth Walker III struggling to make the splash plays we believed to be in his profile (last four games: 2.97 yards per carry), but we are still looking at nothing more than a handcuff back in a spotty offense that ranks third in pass rate over expectation this season.
The 37.7% snap share from Week 12 is something of a ceiling for Charbonnet, and even that wasn’t enough to get him above the six-touch role that he was capped at for the entire month of November. With Seattle playing meaningful games down the stretch, their backup RB deserves to be rostered (40 touches in the two games Walker missed earlier this season), but there should be no temptation to slot him in as a Flex option in any format.
DK Metcalf, WR
DK Metcalf’s role in his two games back has looked just like the one he left, and that’s a good thing. A player with this athletic profile carries extreme upside into any matchup.
That said, I do worry about his potential to access that with Jaxon Smith-Njigba amid his breakout. Metcalf was a WR1 in both Week 2 and Week 3, but he has just one top-25 performance since. I have him ranked safely in the middle of those outcomes, checking in as a middling WR2 this week and moving forward.
The Jets have allowed the fourth-lowest red-zone completion percentage this season (43.2%), further dimming the star of Metcalf for Week 13. You’re still playing him in all formats, but he now resides in the Courtland Sutton tier as opposed to the Puka Nacua one.
Jaxon Smith-Njigba, WR
Jaxon Smith-Njigba is one of five receivers to score 19 PPR points in three straight games this season (others: A.J. Brown, Justin Jefferson, Amon-Ra St. Brown, and Malik Nabers). That’s some pretty good company to keep, and with an expanding route tree (the big play last week came on a beautiful bubble screen), I see no reason to think that the upward trajectory slows.
When it comes to this specific matchup, there’s a strong case to be made for JSN to be considered the top pass catcher in this offense. The Jets rank second in the league in pressure rate through 12 weeks, and …
When Geno Smith is pressured, 2024:
- Smith-Njigba: 1.8 points per target
- DK Metcalf: 1.2 points per target
When Smith is not pressured, 2024:
- Smith-Njigba: 1.8 points per target
- Metcalf: 2.1 points per target
I have both ranked as WR2s that you can feel great about starting this week and for the remainder of 2024 (and beyond).
Tyler Lockett, WR
The Seahawks have told us what they think about the target hierarchy in their offense and it’s pretty clear that Jaxon Smith-Njigba and DK Metcalf are the featured assets with nobody else even remotely close to viable.
Tyler Lockett has put together a great career, but we are in the business of predicting the future, not paying respects to the past. The veteran receiver didn’t earn five targets in a game during November and hasn’t reached 12 expected points in consecutive games since September.
I’d rather roll the dice weekly on any of the receivers in Carolina, opting to embrace the unknown as opposed to ignoring the clear signs of a player being phased out of the offense.